XML sitemap

DefinitionAn XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your site you want search engines to discover and crawl, optionally with the date each was last changed.

One sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites use a sitemap index that points to several files. You can list the sitemap in robots.txt and submit it in Search Console. A sitemap helps discovery; it doesn't make a page rank.

AI Rank Lab's Sitemap generator crawls your site, including JavaScript-rendered sites, and builds the file. Pricing is per block of URLs found; see Generate an XML sitemap.

Learn it step by step

• Generate an XML sitemap (Schema and AI files)

Related terms

• robots.txt: robots.txt is a text file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch, rule by rule for each user agent.
• Canonical URL: A canonical URL is the version of a page you want search engines to treat as the main one when the same content is available at several URLs.
• llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI tools a short summary of the site and a list of its key pages.